One of the things I do at Ghostwoods Books is devise marketing strategies for our books. I thought I'd give you an example of the kinds of issues I have to work around in trying to get people to read our books.

First, I want to say that we are extremely selective in the books we choose to publish. We put about 300 hours of our own work into each book, sometimes more. We do it for what is usually very little or even no money, once we've paid for marketing and all the other expenses that go along with publishing a book. There is no way anyone wants to spend that much time working on a book if they don't actually like it.

So when I say 'issues' here, I mean things about the way that people, either the target audience or not, might perceive the book. Not things you have to do if the book is just plain bad.

Why we have to consider 'not the target audience'

In this marketplace, meaning primarily via the Internet, it's very difficult to target only the exact readers who are going to love a given book. So you'll end up with some who don't like the book. Often the ones who don't like something are the most likely to write reviews. As soon as bad reviews start going up, it becomes a much bigger challenge to market a book. Many of the best marketing tools are promotional sites that exclude books that have bad reviews.

A book to consider

Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaranby Marion Grace Woolley

Due out on February 14th, this book is, arguably, a prequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. I say arguably because its protagonist is a minor character from Leroux's novel. It would be a stretch to say that it's about the Phantom. It's about a young Persian princess. As the author said to me, the book is for people who like their fiction dark and bloody. That in itself might be an issue, but the ones I'm going to address here are these:

1. The book is set in Persia in the 1850s. Most of the characters are Muslim.

This is not the best time to try to sell books about Muslims to Brits and Americans. I'm not saying that's how it should be. It's just how it seems to be. Many people are biased.

(Do not worry, people. These are fictional characters, and even in the book these events happened more than a hundred years ago. You're safe.)

2. The book crosses genre lines. It's not easy to pigeonhole. It's a bit literary. By this I mean, it's well-written and it doesn't follow a standard three or four act structure. (It's character driven.) The main character doesn't start toward a goal, meet various obstacles, and confront them, and eventually arrive at her goal. She just lives, things happen and she reacts. It's a bit historical. It deals with the 1850s in Iran. But it is not strictly factual. It's a bit fantasy. There are magical moments, but they are more illusion than true magic. (Though some of them seem impossible to explain without some sort of magic.) It's not a romance, but it does have some dark romance in it.

3. The whole Phantom of the Opera conundrum.

Gaston Leroux's novel inspired films and a musical which is possibly one of the most produced and loved. It has fierce fans who have coined the word 'Phans.' You'd think this would be a hook into this book. Instead, it's a double-edged sword. The musical and the films don't touch on the Persian back story referenced in the novel. The musical is a tragic love story. The novel is gothic horror.

The main character in this book is the little sultana from Leroux's novel. Two early reviewers claimed that she wasn't part of the Leroux novel. I'm not sure whether they are really referring to the musical or film version, (where she is indeed not a character) or whether they just don't remember because she was such a minor character in the book. She never appeared on the page, but was referred to in conversations between the Phantom and the Persian (the darougheh in this book).

She was Marion Grace Woolley's inspiration for the book. She was the 'what if...?' and 'why?' But are Phans who haven't read the book going to panic at the way that this book reflects the darker aspects of Leroux's Phantom and not the romanticized view depicted by the musical?

No plan survives contact with the reader

My original thinking was that we shouldn't reference The Phantom of the Opera, but that we should just let people discover it for themselves. Like a lot of people, I'm not the biggest fan of musicals and it has put me off of ever reading the Phantom novel. (Or it did until I read this book.) But although the book hasn't been released yet, people have already noticed the connection, in both good and bad ways. (See above reference to readers saying the protagonist wasn't part of Phantom.)

I really love this book. It appeals to me for many reasons, not least of which is that its main character is neither solidly good nor solidly bad. She is instead terribly bad and yet still empathetic. She is jealous and petty and a tiny little tyrant, and yet she can almost be forgiven. For me, she is a symbol of the vengeance that I myself would never wreck but might imagine for a split second. (Mine would be less stabby and involve more karate kicks to the head.)

Her trouble is that because there's no one to tell her no, she loses control of her violence and takes it on the road. This is the stuff of story, without which she would be trapped in the harem. It's only by being bad that her life becomes this story.

New Plan

So here's my new plan. It involves all of you. If I don't have people following me who are interested in this book, I will eat my hat. (And I do have a hat.)

This book answers the question: Who was the little sultana and what would make her so violent? You don't need to have read The Phantom of the Opera to enjoy it. (I hadn't.)

The main character is a young woman of color, though she is, by her birth, enormously privileged yet is a woman in a time and place where women didn't share the same rights as men. She is also bisexual or at least bi-curious.

In essence, the author has taken a classic novel and found a spin for it which makes it diverse, female-centric, anti-sexual violence, and sexual-orientation friendly. It's also intriguing, suspenseful and beautifully written. And it's even a bit risky in a way.

It's a book that deserves support at a time when the enlightened are balking at the overwhelming number of white male driven books. Especially because it's actually a great book. And as a bonus, there's a circus in it.

But to get it into the right hands we're going to need people to recommend it. So if you like a dark, murderous suspense story with a female protagonist who is also kind of villainous, please love on this book. (And if you're a reviewer, ask for a review copy here.

Like many of you, I have taken my own eyesight for granted. I've had a slight visual impairment for around 15 years. I mostly don't notice it until I see video of myself reading with things two inches from my eyes. I wear reading glasses and I enlarge the text on my computer screen and my Kindle. I'm fortunate that this is all I have to do, and I get by very well. I completed two Masters degrees without once asking for any special assistance due to my vision issues. I even got a first at uni in the UK.

But my visual impairment makes me, perhaps, more aware of what it can be like not to see well, or at all. That's why I support Sightsavers. Sightsavers performs vision restoring cataract surgery in impoverished countries. This is surgery that we take very much for granted in the West. In fact, I had a cataract removed from one of my eyes (formed after treatment for an eye injury) so I know how simple this surgery can be.

See how Sightsavers is saving vision and making lives better here. This Malawian grandfather gets to see his tiny grandson for the first time. http://millionmiracles.org/location/malawi/

Forty-eight pounds could give a child back her sight. Ninety-six pounds could restore sight for three adults. If you live in the UK, the UK government will match your contribution until December 31st. (Of course you can donate less. The smaller donations will add up!)

This is a weird holiday season for me. The world feels less friendly than it used to. I'm in a country not my own. This has been a hard year in many ways. Not just for me, for everyone. Of particular concern are the events surrounding police violence against people of color in America. Although I'm away, my heart is very much there. I would be protesting if I could. But more than protesting, I would want to be there for my friends. And with people who I know understand what the protests are about.

I've been dealing with some health issues recently. It's made it hard to sleep sometimes. So while lying awake I think about all the things that are going on in the world. I remember a time when I thought that if we worked really hard we could end racism in America within my lifetime. We could end poverty. I am confronted now with the fact that these were the naive imaginings of a child.

I still hope for these things, but it seems to me that in some ways we're further than ever from achieving them. Longstanding injustices fester in a society like an infected wound. We managed for a long time to smooth over them. To tuck them away in parts of the country, parts of the cities where many of us could avoid seeing them. I witnessed this happening in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a place that was once a lovely liberal city. It still is in some ways. But the mayor and city council, several years ago, made the decision to build the new homeless shelter out in the borderlands, so that people staying there would have to take a long bus trip to get into downtown. Hidden out here, I imagine the city government hoped they could get rid of panhandlers and drunks, people raiding garbage cans for empty pop bottles to return for the deposit. Because it didn't look good for our fair city. It didn't look good to the wealthy business people who had expanded over from Farmington Hills and the wealthy students who came to attend the University of Michigan. The solution to the homeless problem was, for them, to make the homeless less visible. Which really is like saying, the solution to that gunshot wound in your side is to put a shirt on.

But on the other hand, the actual solutions evade us. They require civic participation from everyone who is able. This is difficult since we can't even get people to agree that it's a problem they should help with. And for those of us who do think so, what concrete things can we do? We are told that our help is demeaning. Or hopeless. Or makes the problem worse. We are told that doing nothing is helping things stay the same.

When I was six, I both discovered race and was confronted by racism when I saw a white teacher call an African-American child a bad name when he came to ask her for help. I was instantly on the child's side. But there was little I could do. I didn't even have words to state my case. Just a shock in my solar plexus. What I did with that shock was live quietly and try to be an example. Live well with others of all races and backgrounds. I learned six languages. I traveled widely. I spent a couple of years in Africa. I'm from a modest background, so I did this all on a shoestring, on the border of poverty most of the time.

I worked for a public interest law office, helping low income clients pro bono. I worked as an activist for environmental and social justice, and for progressive voting and education. I marched against unnecessary and unjust wars. I gave speeches. I even ran for office.

I have done all this, and I still don't have any answers. I have fewer answers than I had before. Because I can't control the way other people think. I can't wave a magic wand and erase the bad experiences people have had. I can't take away fear and hate. The hardest thing to accept is that the world is this way. It's not good. And there is little we can do individually and not much more we can do together. Because for every one of us who wants to solve this problem for real, not by hiding it away, but by opening it up, there are ten people who don't want to. For every step in the right direction we go, there is a massive backlash. We end up further along the bleak end of the spectrum.

We are all afraid of change to some extent. Americans have their ways. There is a lot that's good about America. But we are a sheltered people. We tend to feel it's our way or the highway. The internet is bringing people together who haven't been able to talk over ideas before, and we're discovering ways we differ. Americans, on their own high horses, assume their own moral superiority without trying to examine cultural differences. This is the same foundation as benevolent racism. But what can a person do about it, even once aware of it?

I find myself here, missing a bunch of context. Things that British people know, have grown up with. In jokes that I will never get. Words that mean different things. Attitudes, such as class distinctions. I find them problematic. But they just are what they are. This is not my country. I can't fight attitudes that I don't even understand. And really, an argument can easily be made that it's wrong for me to fight British cultural attitudes. How arrogant to think that I know how British people ought to think.

For me, for now, all I can actually do is treat each person I meet as an individual. Try to understand and empathize with them, or if I can't, try to figure out why. I can do this to the limits of my emotional strength. And then I have to take a break to recover some of my energy.

The thing I find worrying in the behavior of most of those fighting on the right side, is that they seem to find it easier to support broad, faceless groups of people than actual human beings. That instead of trying to get along with perceived ideological opponents, in hopes that they may win them over slowly, they lump them all together into the enemy camp and stay far, far away. That, my friends, is how we got into this mess in the first place.

When you go to Starbucks and the barista writes your name on your paper coffee cup, that is your name until you are assigned a new name.

Example: Your name is Alice. The barista writes Ally. You are now Ally until you get more coffee in a new cup with a different name on it.

When someone else orders your coffee and you end up with a cup with their name on it, the rules are invalidated. So you are not Bob just because Bob ordered your coffee. Bulk orders invalidate the rules.

If the barista writes Starbucks on your cup, you are Starbucks. The printed Starbucks logo alone doesn't count.

But what about those times when you purposefully lie abut your name?

Let's say your name is Salome and you decide to go with Jane for ease?

This is where it gets a little complicated. The Fake Name rule is invoked when you make up your name and you become 'Fake Jane' or whatever the fake name was you gave. And you thought there were no consequences for this, didn't you?

Do you have other questions about the rules to the Starbucks Coffee Name Game? Post below and I will ask Thord.

I am about as progressive as anyone I've ever met. My progressive values probably have roots in my rebellion against my family's conservatism as I was growing up. My father once told me that respect and fear were the same thing. I believed that respect and love were closer kin. You will guess that we didn't get along.

I'm speaking to my father on the phone.

"This country is not the same," he says.

I feel worried. I've been away for most of four years, after all.

"Since Obama got in it's all gone to hell," he says.

"Obama was President when I left," I say, meaning to point out to him that I have some personal experience.

"Oh, but all these programs hadn't gone into effect."

He proceeds to give me a litany of all the things that have "gone wrong" in America since I've been away.More people on welfare than ever before in the history of the country. People living like kings on their welfare checks. There's no reason for anyone to work anymore. Half his friends are threatening to quit their jobs and live on welfare, he says.

"Dad, you know I used to help people get benefits in my job before I came here. It's not that easy. Do you know what the poverty guidelines are like? $20,000 for a family of four. (Actually $23K this year.)"

"Oh, but there are all these extras," he tells me. "Housing allowance, foodstamps."

"They don't give people money for housing, Dad. They give it to landlords. There's a waiting list for public housing. And it's usually in bad areas where no one would want to live."

"Foodstamps. You can use them for anything, including marijuana, they've decided."

I look up at the ceiling, thinking he must be wrong. Last I knew you couldn't use foodstamps even to buy cigarettes. I don't say anything, though. I can tell it's useless. (I've since looked it up on Snopes. No, you cannot buy marijuana with 'foodstamps.' )

My father has worked since he was 12 years old. I understand his frustration. I see in his judgements about other people, the crux of the trouble in my country. Bill O'Reilly is the preacher to the working conservatives. His every word taken as God's truth in the absence of any god to give real truth.

"They've canceled your mother's and my insurance. After December 31st, we won't have any insurance."

"Oh, I've looked into the insurance available now. You guys should be able to get a good deal." I rattle off some prices to him from my own research.

"That sounds pretty reasonable," he says. "We have an appointment to meet with our insurance agent.

I have a momentary mood upswing. "Oh, I hope she can offer you Affordale Care Act insurance. It will be a really great deal."

"I don't want any affordable care act. I don't support that. I want no part of it."

My mood drops again.

For me this is the moment when I realize that my father is old. He is not going to live many more years. He is never going to change his opinion. He is never going to want the same things I want in the world.

He believes that foreigners have overrun America. That people come in and get any job they want. That they live openly, above ground, so to speak. Going to their high paying jobs without fear of being deported. That people on welfare are living large on money earned by hard working Americans. He hates these people that he's never met. He hates the government he sees as making them possible.

The truth is that they aren't possible. They don't exist. Living on welfare means living at the lowest level, taking your pleasures in the form of cheap, fast food and cable TV. Being an undocumented worker means working at a low wage job. living in a small apartment with several other working individuals, without privacy. Working for a company that's willing to hire undocumented people, unable to complain about bad working conditions or harrassment or abuse for fear of deportation. So, it will be a restaurant, or some sort of manual labor. There's no health insurance and no upward mobility.

I've worked with these people to get benefits. Because without benefits, they go into crisis. They become homeless. Their children are taken from them and put into foster care. They end up in emergency rooms. They turn to crime in desperation. There is a slippery slope that most of us never see. Once you're on it, it's a battle not to slide further down. Getting back up onto level ground is almost impossible.

I wish I could get my father to see the truth. But what concerns me more is that he is just one of a whole huge demographic of Americans who believe what he believes. They could easily find out that it's not true if they care to look into the facts. But facts are hard to come by. It's easier to believe rumors, propaganda, and flat out lies.

I give him as much truth as I think he can stand. There is one moment where he hesitates, listening to me.

At the end of our conversation, on a completely different topic he says, "Don't give up. Never give up. Keep reaching. Keep trying."

I smile to myself. This is where I got my attitude. the one that pulls me through the toughest times.

My father doesn't recognize the irony of what he's telling me. The one true thing he has said in the past hour is one that I will use to try and change his mind for all the time we have left together on this planet.

In a few hours, Ghostwoods Books will launch a Kickstarter to fund our 2014/2015 list.Since we're all friends here, can I tell you about my vision for this project?

Secretly, or maybe not so secretly, Tim has been letting me do most of the running of Ghostwoods. I don't want to do it all on my own. I need his experience. But I'm learning very quickly and trying to move ahead, to discover new ways of doing things.

I want us to make a great small publishing house that supports the writers it publishes in various ways, including paying them fairly, of course. Protecting their rights to their own work as much as possible. I'd like us to provide all the benefits of any good publisher, like helping our writers network with other writers, with editors, with other publishers, with agents. Also many writers who come to us don't have much experience in publishing. So they don't know basic nuts and bolts stuff. This stops them from looking professional when they put themselves and their work out there to bigger publishers and agents. One of our hopes is that we can provide information and training to help writers reach their potential, something a big publisher just doesn't have time to do.I also want to figure out things like emergency loans or even grants to writers in crisis eventually. I'm sure we'll come up with some other ideas as we go.Screenshot:

We do care about being good. I personally actually love this work. I love helping other writers transform their drafts into publishable quality work. I love the collaboration. I put myself on the line with every book.

We can dedicate ourselves to this, but we still need money to get it up to its potential. Large and medium publishers have deep back lists that continue to make money for them. We need to build up to that. We have a great team and we're ready to move forward.

I will not kid you. There are days when the world seems impossibly difficult. But then, the rest of you show me how fortunate I am. I watch a video of a baby born deaf getting his first hearing aid at seven weeks old. I watch the look of wonder on his face as he hears for the first time. I watch five or six times, and then I send it to my parents. (My dad has lost the hearing in one ear due to a benign tumor that grew on his hearing nerve, and a large percentage of the hearing in the other ear due to not protecting his ears when he thought himself invincible as a young man. Now he wears a sophisticated hearing aid.)Then I watched a video of a man with ALS doing the ice bucket challenge, struggling to breathe and talk and swallow. Struggling. But also laughing. And expressing gratitude. Then I read on twitter about a trans woman's rental deposit on a sublet being taken by the man she rented from, her calls unreturned. She resigned herself to being homeless for a while. Her friends volunteered their couches.Maybe that's our great strength. We keep going when things go wrong. We don't give up.I feel proud to be among you, those whose path is difficult. You are my inspiration. For you, I will strive to train my patience, my humbleness, my helpfulness. For you, I will keep going on the darkest days. With gratitude. For even at the worst of times, I am fortunate.

I've felt compelled to do a bit of digging about Lovecraft's racism, since the new anthology I put together is a tribute to his work. I did know, though only by report, that Lovecraft had problematic racial views. I didn't really know the extent of them until I started poking around. We do not honor his racial biases with our modern cosmic horror writing. In fact, because his work is in the public domain, we are now able to (perhaps ironically) purposefully write 'Lovecraftian' fiction that benefits from the strangeness of Mr. Lovecraft's ideas while deliberately choosing a neutral view of race. [Or maybe this is too strong a statement. We don't deliberately choose it. We're just not racist, so it doesn't come up.]When I look back at what he actually wrote or said about race, I am mortified. When I was a kid, I lived in a very racially divided place. Maybe it's the way of kids, some instinct that has to be beaten or taught out of them, but by instinct I felt that this was wrong and inexplicable. I had many arguments with elders about race, in spite of threats. I remember trying to find books that would support my view of equality and because of where I lived, I found the opposite. My view of interracial marriage as completely fine and essentially just like any other marriage was completely unsupported. The most neutral view I could find in a book (in a library obviously controlled by people determined to reinforce their own racial biases) said that it would create problems because it wasn't culturally acceptable and therefore if you were willing to do it, there must be something psychologically wrong with you.I was troubled by this, but it didn't influence my behavior or thinking. In this area, I had a strong sense of what was right and I never felt swayed from it. For this reason, I find it hard to forgive the kind of race based comments Lovecraft made. Regardless of those comments, the eerie, atmospheric quality of his writing has influenced the course of literature. Even if you never read his work, you are likely only a few degrees of influence away from it. We have the opportunity now to take what was influential about his work and utilize it to make new art that doesn't have a racist stigma attached to it.It's a step toward what we have to do still in the world, as we are reminded by recent events. We must learn how to take what works in our world, or in our literature, what we want to keep as modern and upright, and what we want to set aside as lessons for what we don't want to carry forward.

I've been thinking about anthologies in a time where short stories have lost much of their popularity. Writing shorts is a different skill from writing novels. I guess reading sjhort stories is also a different skill from reading longer fiction. Reading a novel requires patience, but that is made up for, if the book is good, by immersion in the story. But what if you don't have the time or patience to read a novel at the moment? That's the moment to read a short story.Only now there's the internet. So all short attention span moments are devoted to email or Twitter or Facebook. Why do publishers publish anthologies? Or, a question I can answer wtih more assurance: Why does Ghostwoods Books publish anthologies? It's not for the money. It's fo the authors. It's an opportunity for us to meet and work with new authors. It's an opportunity for us to help authors network with other authors. Sometimes new deals or collaborations are struck that way.It's also an opportunity for us to show the quality and care we put into our books. We have very little control over what gets submitted to us on the novel front. As a small publisher, we're in a kind of Catch 22, where most of the best books are submitted to larger publishers with more immediate money to spend on them, and more clout to get them seen by audiences. We have to work up to that. But in the meantime, we need to publish books to advance.It's also fun, as an editor, to work on short fiction. There's some art to putting together an anthology, beyond just deciding which stories to take. There's the ordering, to create a certain pacing to the book. In a themed anthology like you want to avoid too many similar stories. But also, you might have a particular slant you want the stories to take.